Death by 1111101000 Stitches

My SuperWeapon is complete!

The Evil Knitting Plan to knit a Killer Hat went more-or-less according to plan. Oscar thoughtfully woke me up at 7:30, so there was plenty of time to grumble at the dogs and eat some breakfast before getting started.

But my project was almost sabotaged before it began. Look what I discovered when I opened my new packet of cable needles. Can you see the teeth marks? The marks that look as if they were made by dog teeth? Maybe belonging to a small brown dog?


I have no idea how either dog (and one is a more likely culprit than the other, but I wouldn't rule him out) managed to chew up the needles without damaging the package. Unless they sneak off to the Clover factory at night. Or maybe they convinced Elizabeth to let them in to River Knits some afternoon so she could have some "special stock" set aside for me. Neither theory is entirely implausible - I have spectacularly bad dogs.

Fortunately, the cable needles weren't damaged beyond use, and I cast on just before 9:00. It was slow going at first - the smaller needles I used for the first few rows are some plastic material - I think by Boye - and they gripped the yarn pretty firmly. At 9:51, I'd just finished Row 7 - the first round of cable twists.


Once I memorized how to do the cables, and figured out the pattern sequence, the hat moved along much more smoothly. By the time I took a lunch break at noon, I'd finished the entire cable part, and was getting very close to the crown.


Completing the whole thing took longer than it should have - a short lunch break with a frozen pizza turned into a couple hours of interruption (and a little bit of distraction - I was almost finished with The Omnivore's Dilemma). I wasn't able to resume knitting until well after 2:00, but I finished the whole thing - and even wove in the ends - before 4:00!


Even so, I decided not to make the trip to campus, since there was only a slim hope that the mail pickup hadn't happened yet. Today was a beautiful, sunny day, and since I'd neglected the dogs all morning for my knitting, it only seemed fair to let them outside for awhile.


That may not have been such a good idea. This is how Oscar decided to celebrate the outdoors today. I invite you to imagine how dirty a dog can get when he's buried himself butt-deep in compost, face-first.


Lest you think that he was the only bad dog, I'll mention that while Oscar was getting into the compost, Max was eating some dog food that had been... er... pre-eaten (and un-eaten) by the neighbor dog. I didn't think there was any need to get or share pictures of that.

But back to the main story of the day - the hat is finished! It's off to its target on Monday. And it has a name - the Binary Cable Hat. I'm not exactly looking forward to getting mine, but I think I'll be glad to have it.